If you’ve just had an offer accepted, or you’re watching a chain inch towards exchange, the question of when to book the removals firm tends to arrive at the same time as about forty other jobs. You’d think it could wait until the date is fixed. In practice that’s the way people end up moving on a Tuesday they didn’t want, or paying more for the last crew available on a Friday.
The short version is six to eight weeks for a busy date and three to four weeks for a quiet one. But the more useful answer is that you should book when you have a buyer, not when you exchange, and that needs a bit of explaining.
Why waiting for exchange catches people out
The gap between exchange and completion in England is usually somewhere between a week and four weeks. Sometimes it’s the same day. Solicitors agree the completion date at exchange, and most people, quite reasonably, don’t want to commit to a removals firm until there’s a date to commit to. The trouble is that everyone else in the country is doing exactly the same thing, so the moment a Friday completion at the end of the month is agreed, a fair few other households are ringing round for that same Friday too, and by the time you’ve told your mum, sorted the kids and found the number for the removals company you liked, the crews for that day may well be gone, which is how people end up with a firm they found at 9pm on a Sunday with no reviews to speak of.
What works better is getting the survey done and a quote in hand as soon as the sale is agreed. Then you can pencil in a likely date with the firm and confirm it the day you exchange. Most decent firms are used to this, and our team will hold a provisional date and move it if the chain does.
How far ahead to book, by type of move
| Type of move | Book this far ahead |
|---|---|
| Local, midweek, outside summer | Three to four weeks, sometimes less |
| Local, Friday or the last week of the month | Six to eight weeks |
| Local, July and August | Six to eight weeks |
| Long distance, two-day move | Six to eight weeks |
| Overseas, by container | Eight to twelve weeks |
| Office or business move | Six to eight weeks, three months for a big one |
| Packing service | At the same time as the move |
None of these are hard rules. A Wednesday in March can sometimes be booked a few days ahead. A Friday at the end of July often can’t be booked eight weeks ahead either, if you’re unlucky.
The dates that fill up first
Friday is the hardest day to get. Or nearly the hardest, since the Friday before a bank holiday weekend is worse still. People like Friday completions because they get the weekend to unpack, and solicitors like them because the money moves before everyone goes home, so a large share of completions land on Fridays and a large share of removals bookings with them.
The last week of the month is busy for a similar reason, as mortgage offers, rental tenancies and notice periods tend to end on the last day of a month. Put a Friday and a month end together and that’s the day the whole industry is out.
School calendars come into it next, though you’d think they wouldn’t matter as much as they do. Leicestershire schools break up in the second half of July, and families with children try to move in the first fortnight of the summer holidays so they can settle before September. So late July and early August are the busiest weeks of the year for us, and the ones to book furthest ahead.
Our guide to the best time of year to move house goes into the seasons in more detail.
Rushes nobody plans for
Every so often something outside the housing market sends everyone to the same few weeks. The clearest recent example was the stamp duty change on 1 April 2025, when the nil-rate band dropped from £250,000 to £125,000 and first-time buyer relief started at £300,000 instead of £425,000. Buyers who could complete before the deadline did, and HMRC’s figures show March 2025 as one of the busiest months for completions in years. Anyone who left booking to the week of exchange that March had a hard time of it.
The pre-Christmas run is the regular version. Lots of people want to be in the new house for Christmas, so completions bunch up from late November to about the 20th of December. If you’re aiming for December, book in October or early November.
And there’s a local one in Leicester that has nothing to do with the housing market at all. Late June and early July, when the university terms finish, the terraced streets around Clarendon Park, Highfields and the roads off Queens Road fill up with hired vans, parents’ estate cars and stacks of IKEA bags on the pavement, and parking near anything you’d call a front door becomes a matter of luck (the M1 at junction 21 on the same Friday afternoon is its own topic). It doesn’t change how far ahead you need to book a crew, exactly. It does change how long the day takes if you’re moving in that part of the city that week.
Booking at short notice
It can be done. In practice most firms keep a bit of slack in the diary, and moves fall through or shift every week, so a last-minute call on a Tuesday in October has a reasonable chance. A Friday in late July is another matter.
We don’t have clean figures for how far ahead most of our customers book. The way it usually goes, from the diary, is that local moves come in three to five weeks out and long-distance moves a little earlier, with a scattering of next-week jobs in between when a completion date jumps forward. That’s a feel for it rather than a statistic.
If you’re stuck because your completion date has moved and your firm can’t follow it, storage is often the answer. The crew loads on the day you have to leave, and your things go into storage until the keys come through. It costs more than a straight move, but less than a day of paying two lots of people to wait around.
What to have ready when you ring
A survey is the first step with any firm worth booking, whether it’s in person or by video. Have your current and new postcodes, a rough idea of the date, and a sense of what’s going and what isn’t. Say so if there’s anything awkward, like a piano, a loft full of boxes or a third-floor flat. If you want packing done for you, ask for it at the same time, since our packing service is usually booked for the day before the move.
Our moving house checklist puts booking the removals firm at eight weeks out, and that still holds for most moves. For further afield, our long distance removals page explains how two-day moves are planned.
So the advice comes back to where it started. Book the survey once you’ve got a buyer, pencil in the likely date, and confirm it the day you exchange. Leaving it until exchange works sometimes. It’s a gamble on a Friday.
If you’re moving in or around Leicester, from Loughborough down to Market Harborough or out into Rutland, our local house removals team will survey, quote and hold a provisional date for you. Phone 0800 043 5393, Monday to Saturday, 8am to 6pm, or send the form on our contact page with both postcodes and your rough date, and someone from the team will call you back to book the survey. If you’re still comparing firms, it’s worth starting with a removal company in Leicester that will do the survey before it quotes.